YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing and live streaming platform owned by Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, who purchased it on November 13th, 2006, for $1.65 billion in stock.

With the launch of Google's own social-networking site Google+ for a while it was required to have a Google+ profile associated with a YouTube account to be able to upload or comment on content. This was later made optional after consumer backlash and eventually discontinued altogether with the closure of the consumer version of Google+ on April 2nd, 2019.

YouTube launched YouTube Gaming after Amazon's aquisition of Twitch in August 2014 for $970 million. The service primarily competes with Amazon-owned Twitch as well as Microsoft-owned Mixer, which Microsoft bought in January 2016, known as Beam.Pro at the time it was rebranded and relaunched as Mixer a year later.